Conflicting Stories

“Atonement.”

Almost the first sound we hear in Joe Wright’s “Atonement” is the tap of typewriter keys. Soon, the tapping becomes regular, like drumbeats, and it sets the tempo for the music that comes surging in. Later in the film, it rings out as loudly as gunshots. The implication is clear: words can stir us and set us dancing, but they can also kill. That mysterious double power infused Ian McEwan’s novel, published in 2001, and it lingers in Christopher Hampton’s screenplay, which displays immense ingenuity in facing a basic conundrum: how do you film a story about language and not leave it reeking of books?

The first piece of literature we hear is a play by Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), a thirteen-year-old girl—fair and blue-eyed, with a touch of the mad, bad fairy in her gaze. She is writing the play in an English country house in 1935, to be performed by her three unhappy cousins and, with any luck, to be watched by her older sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), whose life seems as unconstricting as her long silk skirt and loose, translucent blouse. Also hanging around, with an undecided future, is Robbie (James McAvoy), the housekeeper’s son, who was put through college by Briony’s father, as an act of charity, and who became, to an undefined extent, part of the Tallis clan. “I told him to join us tonight,” Briony’s brother Leon (Patrick Kennedy) says. Note the verb: Robbie was ordered to dinner, not asked.

In the heat of the day, through the flawed glass of an upstairs window—and so, as it were, through the defective vision of childhood—Briony watches her sister strip to her shift, next to an embarrassed Robbie, and plunge like a nymph into the fountain at the end of the lawn. We discover why, but Briony does not. Later, she bears a letter from Robbie to Cecilia: a note of apology, except that Robbie, fool that he is, writes two notes and by mistake sends the wrong one—an obscene declaration of desire, which Briony promptly reads. (“What’s the worst word you can possibly imagine?” she asks her cousin.) Last, she finds her sister and Robbie making desperate love and, in her role as semi-innocent, misreads the act: “I caught him attacking my sister in the library.” (Again, every deed is overseen by books.) When a genuine sexual assault, unconnected with either of the lovers, is committed that night, Briony, consumed by errors and the throb of her inventiveness, names Robbie as the guilty party. He is hauled away by the police.

We then jump five years—not four, as the film innumerately tells us—to the evacuation of Dunkirk. Robbie, released from jail to serve as a private soldier, is among the Allied troops in France awaiting embarkation from the beaches. (More than three hundred thousand men, most of them members of the retreating British Expeditionary Force, were eventually rescued: a national humiliation recast as a triumph of spirit and initiative, and thus an ominous backdrop to the smaller fabrications in this film.) He is gray with illness, helped along by a comrade-in-arms named Nettle (Daniel Mays)—a working-class Virgil to Robbie’s Dante, with a mouthful of oaths, guiding him from one circle of horrors to the next. Some of these have swelled in the passage from novel to screen: what was, for McEwan, a single rotting corpse underfoot becomes for Wright and Hampton an orchard strewn with dead schoolgirls, each of them with a bullet hole in the brow. Are we so inured to shock these days, or so hard to convince, that only mass slaughter will suffice? The sense of overkill increases on the shore, where Wright’s camera draws a deep breath and, in one unbroken shot, takes in the sights: a Ferris wheel, a figure exercising on a pommel horse, real horses being put down with a pistol, one squad of men running naked to the sea, another bawling hymns on a bandstand, and so on. All human life is here, and it’s falling apart.

Ever since “Atonement” opened the Venice Film Festival in August, this sequence has been lauded for its skill, yet something feels wrong. You find yourself marking off the surreal details as they are ushered into view; compare it with another long take, Ray Liotta’s famous procession through the club in “GoodFellas,” and you feel that, where Scorsese was dramatizing the pomp of the empowered wiseguy, with his pontifical swagger, Wright is sowing the frame with incident for fear that it might lie fallow, and the result is that he risks merely drawing attention to his own style. This ties in with a general suspicion that “Atonement,” as a story about stories, may be too self-conscious for its own good. You have to admire it, when so much of the competition seems inane and slack, but you can’t help wondering, with some impatience, what happened to its heart.

Interleaved with Robbie’s time in France are a number of scenes that show us how he got there, and what happened once the British troops returned. In a London tearoom, shortly before his departure, he meets Cecilia, who is working as a nurse, and the strange sensation that Wright has brewed up a colored and contorted version of David Lean’s “Brief Encounter” (1945) is hard to dispel. Knightley and McAvoy press hands over the teacups with the same agonized formality as Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, and Knightley’s pure period accent (her pronunciation of “very” is halfway to “veddy”) suddenly sounds as brittle as bone china—her home, she says, is “a tiny flet.” Briony, too, has become a London nurse, but Cecilia can never forgive her for incriminating Robbie, and the sisters are estranged. Briony has grown into a tall, severe, not quite beautiful young woman (played by Romola Garai, who tamps down her customary lusciousness) with ambitions to be a novelist. She has a friend on the ward, Fiona (Michelle Duncan), whose giggling confession that “I couldn’t marry anyone who wasn’t in the Royal Navy” makes her, like Private Nettle, not just refreshingly bluff but oddly more credible than the complex major characters around her. When the wounded from France are stretchered into the hospital, Fiona crumples, whereas Briony looks stiff and stricken at the scale of human suffering. She tries to remain detached (“There is no Briony,” the matron in charge declares), yet how can so much be borne, when the single act of cruelty that she herself inflicted, one day in 1935, will take a lifetime—and a life of writing—to redeem?

Such is the atonement of the title: an echo of the “sob of atonement” given by the governess in “The Turn of the Screw” as she kisses one of the children she so badly wishes to be innocent. Henry James’s story, which sees that wish tested to appalling extremes, is a clear forerunner of McEwan’s, and there is a fascinating, Jamesian intervention toward the end of Wright’s film, where the elderly, dying Briony (Vanessa Redgrave) guides us, as Nettle guided Robbie, through the twists of what actually happened, back in the cauldron of war. It is time, she says, for “the absolute truth,” yet even now there is a haze of evasion; in revealing the destinies of Robbie and Cecilia, she takes the opportunity to improve them—to touch them up with joy as she writes them down. This is a commonplace of mature narrative, and none the worse for it: the white-haired heroes of late Shakespeare, like Leontes and Pericles, enact it obsessively, as if to heal the child-harming wounds that both they and their tragic predecessors, from Shylock to Lear, have allowed to fester. Nothing is more insistent, in the artist’s mind, than the will to transfigure the hellbent into the heaven-sent, and you can see the urge to make good writ large on Redgrave’s impassioned face, and hear it in the softly troubled rasp of her voice. Just one problem: her last, beneficent lie made me look back over the expanse of the film and realize, to my dismay, that I hardly believed a word of it.

For a start, I didn’t believe in Robbie. A young man seen pushing a wheelbarrow through the grounds of an estate, in 1935, does not get invited (or even told) to join the owners for dinner, whether or not he has a Cambridge scholarship; that is a liberal, postwar dream of what education could achieve, and of how it might dissolve the class divide. Beyond that, I didn’t believe in the force of his love for Cecilia, or of hers for him; when they are sundered on a London street, it should be a sickening wrench, as it is in the novel, but here it passes off lightly, and, instead of weeping, you ask yourself whether the bus bearing Cecilia away would really have been that shiny. She herself is all surface, a perfect shell of English breeding, and, aside from the cut-grass green of her evening dress, the high blush of color on her cheekbones is almost her only index of palpable feeling; even the lush tones of her name—Thomas Tallis stands at the forefront of British composers, and Cecilia is the patron saint of music—are shortened by her family to the single note of Cee. If there is an instant at which “Atonement” flings off its cleverness long enough to stir the soul, it comes as Robbie writes his two letters, the polite and the pornographic, to the accompaniment of “La Bohème” on the gramophone. (He listens to the great Thomas Beecham recording, which wasn’t made until 1956.) We cut to Cecilia at her dressing table, in front of the looking glass, with a cigarette, and, as the music bursts, we are struck not just by her beauty but by the deep, guilty secret of this equally beautiful, unsatisfying film: it’s done with smoke and mirrors. ♦